Enhanced availability of mobile Internet has resulted in a hyper-growth of smart mobile applications. Many of these applications make use of spatially annotated information to provide a broad set of location-aware services such as finding the nearest (Greek) restaurant, or the nearest (cheap) gas-station, targeted mobile advertisements, and so on. The introduction of smart, sensing-enabling technologies can only hasten the growth trend of mobile applications.
Many of these mobile applications can benefit if their application (in the mobile device) or the application server (in the cloud or datacenter) is aware of the spatial coordinates of the information sources. If the source device is equipped with a global positioning system (GPS), it can attach geo-coordinate metadata to application sessions. However, possessing GPS may not always be possible (due to form factors (i.e., anything related to the form characteristics of an object such as shape, size and weight), cost reasons, energy consumption, etc.) or GPS may not be always operational, e.g., in indoor environments.
Cellular network infrastructure can provide value-add by estimating device location and creating location metadata for the device. Traditional cellular base-stations can estimate device location using transmit power. Femto cells (e.g., in homes) or pico cells (e.g., in malls), and WiFi hotspots (e.g., in airports) may be configured with location information. This information can be stored in a network provider's infrastructure and become available through a location service to end-user applications. The location service can query the infrastructure of the provider to retrieve the location of the source, or an estimate of it, that can then be used to customize the location service response to the user, for example, where a user uses her mobile telephone to connect to a location service provider, say, to search for movie theaters and movies near her location. The location service provider queries the cellular company provider for the location of the user. The cellular company provides this information using, for example, the cell tower information that the mobile telephone was connected to, assisted GPS, etc.
As can be seen from this example, the location data and hence location services are intimately tied to the cellular company provider who will also typically own the relationship with the end-user. In other words, data of spatiotemporal significance become tied to a location infrastructure and the utility of these data is restricted by the access rights to that location infrastructure, e.g., requires access to location information from a cellular company provider.
Therefore, the creation of open, smart, location-enabled applications, wherein the dependencies on existing location infrastructures are reduced would be desirable.